1670 Bockler Map Holyland showing Moses and Aaron

Title

Description

An extremely rare plan of the Israel, Palestine, or the Holy Land issued in Wittenberg, Germany, around 1670 for Martin Luther's Protestant translation of the Bible. This rare Bible contained several early maps of the Holy Land drawn by Georg Andreas Bockler. All examples of Bockler's work are extremely rare and are almost always, as in our example, exhibit condition issues. This particular map depicts the region with a westward orientation, with Egypt appearing on the right, the Mediterranean at the top of the map, and the Red Sea to the South. Portraits of Moses and Aaron appear in the upper left and right quadrants. Jonah and the Whale appear in the Mediterranean, as do a caravan of ships transporting Lebanese cedar for Solomon's Temple. The primary focus of this map is the winding path from Egypt to the Jordan River attempts to illustrates the wandering of the Israelites following the Exodus. Images of Temple relics and other Judaica, including the Arc of the Covenant, appear in the lower right quadrant.

Cartographer

Georg Andreas Böckler ( 1644 - 1698 ) was a German architect, engraver, and engineer who wrote is best known for his lavishly engraved Architectura Curiosa Nova (1664) and Theatrum Machinarum Novum (1661). Based in in the city of Nuremberg, Germany, Bockler specialized in hydraulic architecture. Architectura Curiosa Nova was his most important work. It is mainly a book on theory and application of hydrodynamics for fountains, water-jets, garden fountains and well heads with many designs for free-standing fountains. The fourth part includes designs for grottoes and garden pavilions. In 1661 Böckler wrote Theatrum Machinarum Novum, an important work on windmills, pumps and other hydraulic machines. Cartographically Bockler did little work but his corpus does include several important and scarcest maps of Jerusalem published in a 1670 edition of Martin Luther's Protestant translation of the Holy Bible. Bockler's name is sometimes written as Boeckler.

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